The Deep End | Paul Venezia

Another dissection

Paul Venezia — 2008-07-23T17:07:29-05:00

In another San Francisco Chronicle article today, there are some quotes and summarizations from this morning's bail hearing: A judge refused today to lower the $5 million bail for a San Francisco computer engineer accused of hijacking the city's network, after prosecutors said he had rigged the system to melt down during routine maintenance. Prosecutor Conrad del Rosario said Childs had arranged the system so that key programs were held in temporary memory files that would evaporate when the network was shut down during routine maintenance or any unexpected power failure. The city had scheduled a shutdown for regular maintenance... READ MORE

Childs' motion for reduced bail has been denied

Paul Venezia — 2008-07-23T14:30:53-05:00

Terry Childs remains in jail for lack of $5 million bail. Apparently, the city claims that there are still three networks that remain "locked", and bullets were found in Childs' home during the police search. The city also brought up his 25-year-old felony conviction. But to keep him on $5 million bail, there has to be more to this story. Has to be.... READ MORE

Still not getting it right

Paul Venezia — 2008-07-23T14:30:35-05:00

The San Francisco Chronicle ran a story today on Mayor Newsom's intervention in the Terry Childs case. Unfortunately, they continued the spate of inaccuracies surrounding this case: "But there was a snag, Ballard said - the code that Childs supplied to Newsom didn't function immediately. Newsom had to call back the attorney, who provided more information, and the system started working, officials say." It's reasonably likely that the reason it didn't immediately work was that there were ACLs on the vty consoles for each router, and they had to telnet/ssh in from a specific subnet. But I think it should... READ MORE

The network as art

Paul Venezia — 2008-07-23T09:40:12-05:00

On Sunday, I wrote a blog post titled "Distillation" in which I said: "It's quite difficult to accurately convey the stress and effort required to build and maintain large complex networks to those with no real frame of reference. I've done it for years, building networks for city governments, universities, hospitals, and private companies. At some point, a network moves beyond "straightforward" complexity, and almost becomes a work of art. Whether it's a clever iBGP VPN failover for a large MPLS-based WAN, an OSPF-based ISDN dialback configuration, or a novel method of route injection through a third-party cloud, there are... READ MORE

This?! This is the DNS flaw?

Paul Venezia — 2008-07-23T00:29:22-05:00

I casually read Halvar Flake's post speculating on the nature of the DNS flaw this evening. Everyone and their brother appears to be in panic mode over this, but I was blown away by the simplicity. Halvar might have missed a small detail or two, but apparently, he got it more or less correct. But there must be more to it than this, right? If not, then could it be that such an obvious flaw has been overlooked for more than twenty years because it's so ridiculously simple? Everyone that should have known and/or fixed this missed it due to... READ MORE

Some interesting points on the Childs case

Paul Venezia — 2008-07-22T15:09:05-05:00

As I mentioned in my post on Sunday, my inbox has been quite busy recently. I've received several notes from past colleagues of Terry Childs, some who worked with him well before he was employed by the City of San Francisco, some more recently. Each one of them portray him in a positive light, and universally refer to him as a gifted network engineer. Other emails offer some other interesting points of view. I received note from Richard Childers that definitely struck a chord. In pondering this situation, he reflected that most organizations actually demand an above-and-beyond attitude from their... READ MORE

Distillation

Paul Venezia — 2008-07-20T09:00:31-05:00

My story on Terry Childs and the San Francisco City network "hostage situation" ran late in the day on Friday. Since then I've received numerous emails, some offering more information, some thanking me for providing some clarity to what is still a murky subject, and some asking more questions than I have answers for. In order to keep things together in my mind, and perhaps for those looking for information on this story, I'm going to attempt to relay what I know so far, including some new information, some hypotheses, and -- unfortunately -- some more questions. Now that we... READ MORE

Notes from the (San Francisco City IT Department) Underground

Paul Venezia — 2008-07-18T13:47:23-05:00

This week, I wrote a few posts about Terry Childs and the City of San Francisco's "hostage situation". Based on the smattering of information made public, there seemed to be much more -- and much less -- to this story than city officials were divulging. I postulated that this sounded like a network-level issue, and that the fix couldn't possibly cost millions of dollars, especially if all we're talking about are logins and passwords to the routers and switches that make up the city's FiberWAN network. Apparently, I was correct. In a private email referencing those posts, and speaking under... READ MORE

So I got an iPhone, see...

Paul Venezia — 2008-07-17T10:21:47-05:00

A few weeks ago, I wrote a little post titled "Why the iPhone isn't for me". I listed seven reasons that the iPhone fell short of my needs and expectations. Needless to say, this generated some discussion, both public and private. Nobody really debated any of the reasons, but they certainly felt the need to let me know that they loved their iPhone (or that they didn't), but one message came through loud and clear: "You don't own one, so how can you really know?". I've had an iPod Touch for a year now, so I do know the interface... READ MORE

The criminal, digital divide

Paul Venezia — 2008-07-17T07:45:39-05:00

So after I wrote about the San Francisco network hostage situation yesterday, I started thinking a bit more about this situation. Based on all the data I've found in the press, it certainly appears that Terry Childs changed the passwords on some number of network devices within the city's network. If there's more to this story (such as the rumors that he was a DBA and this was an Oracle sabotage job), then we move into a completely different ballpark. As it stands now, using the information publicly available, what Childs has done could be considered a juvenile prank, not... READ MORE

An outside scoop on San Francisco's network lockout

Paul Venezia — 2008-07-16T13:44:38-05:00

If you haven't heard, San Francisco is being held hostage. At least, the city's new network is being held hostage. It seems that Terry Childs, a disgruntled network admin took it upon himself to lock out all the other admins from "the city's new FiberWAN network," and is currently hanging out in jail, holding the keys to San Francisco's kingdom. There have been many articles written about this event, and they all share an obscene lack of detail. The "network" as used in these pieces could be interpreted as just about anything from one or more servers, the network switches... READ MORE

...and justice for all

Paul Venezia — 2008-07-09T10:21:08-05:00

If you've been following my tale of Google AdSense woe, you know that just under a month ago, Google disabled my AdSense account for no apparent reason. I didn't even notice for four days, as I was traveling at the time and buried in the midst of a major network core restructuring project, but when I did notice, I filled out their dispute form. Several weeks later, I was notified that my appeal was denied, and I was still persona non grata. I filled out another dispute form following that rejection, but had resigned myself to a lifetime bereft of... READ MORE

Who's clicking who?

Paul Venezia — 2008-07-07T10:05:50-05:00

I read this article on The Register with interest this weekend. It seems that the latest version of AVG anti-virus has implemented a "feature" that clicks links on Web pages for you, scanning the resulting pages for malware. In theory this might be considered a good idea. In practice it's a terrible idea. The concept is that by clicking all those links for you (and apparently they're limited to search results, but who really knows?), AVG can better protect the user from malware-laden links. The obvious problem is that AVG uses standard browser identification strings to do this, so each... READ MORE

The 10 days of Vista

Paul Venezia — 2008-07-03T12:25:35-05:00

Last week I decided to build a high-powered Vista workstation and give it a go for the first time in almost a year and a half. I was genuinely surprised that I actually enjoyed the experience. In fact, though I've largely gone back to my Mac and Linux laptops and workstations, I do use RDC to the Vista system for those times when I need Windows. My XP installation has laid dormant for ten days now, and I don't think it'll be coming back. That said, it hasn't been all wine and roses. Vista refuses to properly suspend the system,... READ MORE

Why the iPhone isn't for me

Paul Venezia — 2008-07-01T14:59:15-05:00

To preface, I've used iPhones and I have an iPod Touch that I use constantly. I love the interface, and I dig the device. Initially, I had to resist the urge to just buy an iPhone and deal with these problems, but I didn't, opting to get a Nokia N95 instead. A year has passed, and I've realized that I definitely made the right choice -- the limitations of the original iPhone (and the iPhone 2.0) are simply too numerous. Perhaps I've been spoiled by my N95 (and truth be told, I'll be getting an N96 in the next few... READ MORE